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Smith: New soccer league's goal? Neighborhood pride

Welcome to Indy City Futbol, a fledgling neighborhood-based recreation league with big, community-building aspirations. It's not enough to get people to play soccer, a sport attracting high interest right now. The organizers, including the nonprofit Big Car and the new Indy Eleven professional team, want to encourage a new level of neighborhood pride and interaction.

Smith: New soccer league's goal? Neighborhood pride

Indy Eleven's Mike Ambersley reacts to a goal against San Antonio Scorpions at IUPUI's Carroll Stadium Saturday May 31, 2014. San Antonio won 2-1.(Photo: Chris Bergin/ for The Star)Buy Photo

For weeks, there's been trash talking. The kind that would get a professional athlete like Lance Stephenson into trouble, but is perfect for a bunch of everyday Hoosiers who love their neighborhoods and just want to play soccer.

Welcome to Indy City Futbol, a fledgling neighborhood-based recreation league with big, community-building aspirations. It's not enough to get people to play soccer, a sport attracting high interest right now. The organizers, including the nonprofit Big Car and the new Indy Eleven professional team, want to encourage a new level of neighborhood pride and interaction.

So far, so good. With teams such as Meridian Kessler United and Real Fletcher Place, the league signed up twice as many players as it expected and had to add five teams to the original list. Even suburbanites are driving in to play. The matches start Wednesday at White River State Park.

Indy City Futbol isn't just any old rec league, though.

It's a way to bring people together across Central Indiana. To break down the silos in which so many of us live in order to build a stronger, more integrated community.

"Most rec leagues, you typically sign up with a group of friends. This is very specifically based on geography," said Jordan Updike, who has led the development of the league. "While Indy Eleven is trying to get people excited about soccer, Big Car is looking to create opportunities to put people who might not cross paths otherwise in the same place. That's the exciting part."

In Indianapolis, we don't have many things that bring Hoosiers of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds together in one place, at one time.

We have Colts games, which, with the astronomical ticket prices, mostly attracts a wealthier set of fans.

We have the Pacers games, which aren't much better.

We have Indiana Black Expo, which attracts mostly black people.

We have the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, the latter of which I've heard dubbed "Indiana White Expo."

Downtown residents stick to Downtown and joke about packing a lunch to go to Hamilton County. Northsiders mostly stick to the Northside and Southsiders to the Southside. Suburbanites come Downtown for work and for entertainment, and then head right back to the suburbs. People in the urban core hang out in the urban core - and others are too scared to go there.

To start to chip away at some of the bigger problems in our community, things like rampant gun violence and an uneven access to high quality education, we're going to have to work together. And to work together, we first have to get to know one another. And we to get to know one another, we first need a reason to break out of our silos.

Experiments such as Indy City Futbol can do that.

It worked in Detroit, a city that's far more divided than Indianapolis is in terms of class, race and ethnicity. The league there, which is in its fifth season, is fairly diverse and has grown more popular every year.

None of this is a sure thing in Indianapolis, though.

Updike says he has no idea who will show up to play. He has only communicated with team members online and via text, and won't hazard a guess as to the demographics of the new league. But with neighborhoods ranging from Lafayette Square (team Lafayette FC) and Haughville (team Real West), the chance of the league being diverse is decent.

The real test will come Wednesday.

The experiment could fail after a year, or it could be wildly successful. Either way, Indianapolis needs a few more community-building experiments like this one.

We're a big city, but sometimes, we could use a dose of small-town interaction.